They shall not starve

In 1944 there were 89,575 persons registered as unemployed in the U.K. . As a result in May 1944 the British Government produced a White Paper on Employment Policy. It’s opening paragraph stated: “the Government accept as one of their primary aims and responsibilities the maintenance of a high and stable level of employment.” By 1954, the unemployed  had increased to 317,767. The fifties are generally regarded as good years for the economy. But despite these being the ‘you've never had it so good’ years the average unemployment figure across the decade was just shy of 370,000. By the end of the decade unemployment was over half a million. The goal of full employment was quietly dropped.

Whilst the numbers fluctuated in the sixties in half the years unemployment remained over half a million workers. But it was not until the 1970’s that unemployment crashed through the million mark. This happened in July 1975 as the Labour government struggled with the twin demands of the IMF and a resurgent trade union movement. Since then unemployment has never fallen below one million, reaching 3.4 million in January 1985 as Thatcher strove to drive ‘socialism’ out of the U.K., a policy that meant the destruction of the trade union movement and the salami-like slicing of the public sector.

The public need to pay attention

Unemployment has never gone away. In December the official number was 1.69 million, an increase of over 400,000 in a year. Unemployment is rising amongst all age groups. The pandemic has exacerbated the trend. All unemployment represents a private tragedy for the person affected. Long-term unemployment is the most pernicious. As journalist and activist Charlotte Hughes told me:”I don’t think most people have a clue what life on benefits is like until they experience it themselves. Years of the benefit scrounger rhetoric has played a big part in this.” Many people assume that not only could unemployment not happen to them personally, but that those reliant on benefits are there through some kind of moral failing. Charlotte continued: “The public need to pay attention to this because quite honestly it could be them next and no job is stable at the moment.”

As Charlotte told me the pandemic has certainly exacerbated things, taking away opportunities for those looking for a way out of poverty whilst simultaneously plunging more and more people into the horrors of the benefit system. However, we should be wary of placing all the blame on Covid-19, unemployment and poverty are long-term, structural features of a capitalist system in decline. Whilst some countries seem better able to resist the worst excesses of the system, for most workers, particularly those with least skills and subsequently lower pay, fear of unemployment is never far away.

Charlotte’s words remind us that unemployment is not just a statistic, it is a life changing experience. Of course, not everybody experiences unemployment in the same way. For many people it is simply a short-term transition from one job to another. But, for many more unemployment is a long-term experience which gradually erodes their sense of self-worth. It is difficult to find accurate figures for how long people have been unemployed. In 2015 the Joseph Rowntree Foundation estimated the number of long-term unemployed at 570,000, whilst the OECD calculates that 25.1% of the U.K. unemployed in 2019 had been unemployed for more than 12 months. Constant changes in the way these statistics are compiled does not help. As the Politics.co.U.K. Website notes: “Over the last 25 years, numerous revisions to the official definition of "unemployment" have been made, which have almost universally revised it downwards.”

Pushed to breaking point

Barbara Petrongolo notes that “long-term unemployment adversely affects the mental and physical well-being of individuals involved and is one of the most important causes of poverty for their households.” Chris Alston who works with ex-offenders told me: “Job coaches often talk down to people and rather than offer support they are authoritarian which people who have been in prison respond negatively to...The culture for job seeking is mass application..the impact on self-esteem is huge. You have people being rejected left, right and Centre and that builds up feelings of inadequacy and lowers confidence. Over time the cycle of rejection and not having the money to live any sort of life, literally living off charity, pushes people to breaking point. People either commit crime, attempt suicide, or turn to some sort of numbing vice either drink or drugs.”

In 1944 there was a genuine belief that the end of the war would see an end to the type of poverty that had blighted the twenties and thirties. In 1942 the Beveridge Report proposed a new system of national insurance to replace the hated poor laws. It was based on a set of assumptions including full employment which, of course, never happened. Beveridge, a liberal, is often presented as a radical reformer, he was certainly a reformer but whether he was radical depends on your definition. A radical proposal would not have sought to manage poverty but eradicate it once and for all. At the very least a radical might have supported a minimum wage below which no worker could be employed. Whilst what Beveridge proposed was certainly more generous than what had preceded it, he was clear that benefits should remove want without removing the incentive to work. In some ways, the subsistence benefit levels became a de facto minimum wage, though in reality many workers preferred to exist on low wages rather than be reliant on benefits which from the outset were beset by accusations of ‘scrounging’.

The situation that led to the creation of the welfare state was the dire circumstances in which many workers found themselves prior to the outbreak of war. These conditions are encapsulated in the iconic 1936 ‘Jarrow Crusade’ in which two hundred men from Jarrow marched to London to protest against poverty and unemployment. When they got to Parliament they handed in a petition, which was never debated and then they walked back home.

Beveridge credited for communist agitation 

Marches of the unemployed were not uncommon during the 20’s and 30’s. You might wonder why it is only Jarrow that is remembered. The National Unemployed Workers Movement, led by Wal Hannington, organised a series of ‘Hunger Marches’ some attracting hundreds of thousands of participants. Like the Jarrow Marchers that followed them, these marchers, mainly unemployed miners, delivered petitions. Unlike the Jarrow marchers they did not then quietly turn round and go home. They stayed in London agitating for better conditions.

Hannington, a founding member of the Communist Party of Great Britain, founded the NUWM with other great socialists including Thom Mann and Harry McShane. When they teach you about the 30’s in school they somehow omit the bit where the foundation of the modern welfare state was largely a result of communist agitation. Richard Croucher in his book ‘We Refuse To Starve In Silence notes “the NUWM laid the foundation for a new system of social benefits traditionally credited to the Beveridge Report.” It’s better to pretend that the welfare state was the result of well meaning liberals than admit that had it not been for mass demonstrations organised by members of the Communist Party the government would never have conceded the ending of means testing, nor the creation of universal unemployment benefit.

The fact that almost everybody reading this will know of the Jarrow March but hardly anybody will know of the NUWM hunger marches shows clearly enough how history is manipulated to sanitise the message. The Jarrow March was supported by both the Labour Party and the TUC and having marched it is not clear if a single one of the Jarrow men actually got anything but sore feet for their efforts. As University of Newcastle historian Matt Perry concedes: “the Crusade did not succeed in its stated goal. Their strategy of gaining sympathetic press coverage failed to achieve either concessions from the Government or a hearing from ministers. Ironically the now largely forgotten National Hunger March taking place at the same time as the Crusade secured the postponement of new scales of unemployment relief.”

Unemployed Struggles

As Hannington notes in the brilliant ‘Unemployed Struggles’ the election of a Labour Government in 1929 caused great optimism amongst the unemployed that things were about to improve. Optimism that was quickly scotched. The NUWM, by then a mass organisation with branches in virtually every major centre drew up a charter to be presented to the Labour Minister for Employment, Margaret Bondfield. The Charter included the following:

• Raise the benefits of the unemployed above poverty level
• Remove the “not genuinely seeking work” clause
• Abolish the six day waiting period
• Reduce the working day with no loss of pay

The parallels to today are uncanny. Anybody who has dealt with the DWP will know of the 5 week wait for the benefit to arrive. Those seeking what is now called Jobseekers Allowance are expected to take ‘steps’ to show that they are ‘actively seeking work’. The result is that benefit office staff have an enormous and often humiliating (for the claimant) amount of power to decide whether an adult receives a pittance on which to survive.

What is really interesting about Hannington’s memoir is that neither the TUC nor Labour Party wanted anything to do with the NUWM which, they claimed, was controlled by a foreign power - Russia. But the real reason for their antipathy was that they were suspicious of a mass organisation of ordinary people who refused to acknowledge their betters. Indeed, the NUWM had a philosophy which encouraged a belief that only through agitation and struggle could concessions be prised from the hands of capitalists who they regarded as class enemies.

Hannington points out: “In fact, the whole of working-class history proves that the workers have never gained anything by way of improved standards, liberties or democratic rights, without persistent organisation and struggle. The ruling class have never given concessions to the subject class out of good-heartedness or human consideration. Right down the ages all improvements have had to be wrung from the ruling class by the organised strength and action of the workers. Every item of the boasted progressive or protective legislation of the past hundred years - the provision of public health, education, and the other social services - has been preceded by intense agitation, sometimes extending for years, on the part of the workers outside of Parliament.”

People are scared of the DWP

There is no equivalent of the NUWM in the U.K. currently. Organising the unemployed is always difficult. If it’s hard to get people who are in a workplace to join a union, how much more difficult to get people who actually don’t want to have the thing they have in common, in common. As activist Charlotte Hughes says “I’d like to see the equivalent of the hunger marches taking place but we live in different times now. It’s very hard to get people to join movements like this. So many people are scared of the DWP or their employers.” In the 1980’s the TUC organised the People’s March for Jobs. Despite being supported by a rally of over 100,000 people at Hyde Park the march had the same result as the Jarrow March on which it was inspired. Charlotte knows from her own experience how difficult it is to get those at their lowest ebb to join a movement. It takes a lot of hard work and organisation and local organisations rarely have the capacity to go nationwide. Unlike in the 20’s and 30’s the majority of today’s unemployed are not from heavily unionised industries like mining and shipbuilding. They tend to be lower skilled and less well educated and in many cases have never had what you might call a permanent job. In a very real sense they are what Marx termed a ‘reserve army of labour’, able to be deployed quickly and cheaply if capital is expanding, but equally able to be discarded in times of retrenchment.

In an economic system based on consumerism, fuelled by the wages of those working, the unemployed are literally outside the system, despite their eagerness to be brought within. Unemployment is a source of shame for people who know, because they are constantly reminded, that they are not contributing to society in a way which they are expected. This cannot but affect their self-esteem and motivation. The benefit system is designed to be both harsh and punitive in an attempt to drive people into jobs that simply do not exist. In December there were an estimated 547,000 job vacancies which means there are more than 3 unemployed people for every vacancy, and that says nothing about whether people’s qualifications and experience match the jobs on offer.

The campaigns against austerity have become the place that the left organise against unemployment. But, whilst these campaigns have been effective and gained a lot of support they allow unemployment to remain hidden within a catch-all which includes unemployment, under employment, casual employment, more general poverty and issues around disability. All of these are important, but the beauty of the hunger marches was that they were very specific and were able to generate specific demands. More importantly, unemployment and its structural nature gets to the very heart of why capitalism can never deliver the equality so many people believe is simply a government away. The way in which Labour has traditionally dealt with trade unions and the unemployed should be clear enough evidence that those who now control the party are from a tradition that has always put the interests of capital before the interests of workers - whether employed or unemployed.

I am not proposing a hunger march, that would be inappropriate in a pandemic, but the outcry over food boxes reminds us that the easy answer to poverty is some form of charity which, by design or not, encourages a sense of dependence. The public, rightly, are outraged by the thought of children going hungry. But behind every picture of a hungry child is a hungry parent desperately trying to maintain their self-respect. Giving food, or food vouchers provides a sense of doing something. Giving money maintains people’s sense of agency, but what people also need is a sense of belonging, a sense that they are contributing to society in a meaningful way. Nobody wants to be the recipient of a handout, the vast majority of people want simply to live a life with meaning able to feed, clothe and house their family. Anybody who thinks that is obtainable within a capitalism system really hasn’t been paying attention for the past 100 years.

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